The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy the Act and the Place of Poetry

Michael Bishop Review Article Presence and Image: The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy The Act and the Place of Poetry. Selected Essays. Edited by John T. Naughton. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Pp. 172.$26.95. The significance and profundity of the work of Yves Bonnefoy in the realm of contemporary French letters can hardly be overstated in an age frantic with the hydraheaded pursuits of form and structure, system and concept, dizzy with the flashing myriad prestiges of a rattling nothingness whose endless niceties we tirelessly construct and deconstruct. In the wake of the many writings Bonnefoy has offered us since the publication in 1953 of Du mouvement et de l'immobilite de Douve-poetry, essays and books on art and literature, translations of Shakespeare, etc.-have come numerous assessments and analyses, by critics and poets, philosophers and linguists, that have served to dem onstrate the centrality and brilliance of a demarche finally crowned, in I 98 I, by his nomination to the Chair of Comparative Studies in Poetic Function at the College de France, upon the death of Roland Barthes. Thus, after the powerful and seminal critical work of writers such as Jean-Pierre Richard, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Emmanuel Clan cier, Philippe Jaccottet and others, came the penetrating study of John Jackson ( Yves Bonnefoy, Seghers, I 976), the special issues of L'Arc (1976) and World Literature Today ( 1979), the Cnllnque de Cerisy in 1983 (published with S U Din I 985), and a flurry of major analyses by Jerome Thelot (La Poitique d' Yves Bonnefoy, Droz, 1983), Mary Ann Caws ( Yves Bonnefoy, Twayne, 1984), John Naughton (The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy, Chicago, 1984), Richard Vernier ( Yves Bonnefoy ou /es mots comme le ciel, Narr, 1985), Gerard Gasarian ( Yves Bonnefoy, POETICS OF YVES BONNEFOY 281 la poesie, la presence, Champ Vallon, 1986). More recently have appeared the studies of Daniel Leuwers ( Yves Bonnefoy, Rodopi, 1988) and Michele Finck ( Yves Bonnefoy: le simple et le sens, Corti, 1989). Not surprisingly Bonnefoy's work has become the object of substantial translation: one may note, in particular, Oft he Movement and Immobility of Douve by Galway Kinnel (U of Ohio P, 1957), Written Stone by Susanna Lang (U of Massachusetts P, 1976), Poems 1959-1975 by Richard Pevear (Random House, 1984) and John Naughton's The Act and the Place of Poetry. Selected Essays (U of Chicago P, 1989). What is it that Bonnefoy has to say that provokes such diligent attention and such prolific response? Is his poetry so profoundly original; are his thoughts so truly compelling, so essential to our contemporary sensibility? To answer these questions we must, para doxically, immediately plunge into the heart of much that is central to Bonnefoy's own art, as well as his conception of all creative gestures. His writing is at once aggressive, dry-eyed, deconstructive, recalci trant, and recuperative, loving, healing, synthetic. His piercing ana lyses are thus always compassionate, his iconoclastic tendencies con stantly held in rein by a will for integration, comprehension and unity. His poetry, in this regard, whilst never flatly didactic, is always deeply ethical. It craves meaning, purpose and ontic worth-for its author, for itself, for all those that peruse it. Moreover, whilst implicitly rejecting much literature that surrounds it and from which it diverges, read in the light of Bonnefoy's own critical and philosophical writings, its line of development, far from being satirical, parodic, antagonistic, opts for assent and embrace, openness and vulnerability. If, further more, his analytical essays are specific in their delineations and often focus upon given writers and artists-Mallarme, Rimbaud, Baude laire, Desbordes-Valmore, Valery, Jouve, and Des Forets; Balthus, Ubac, Mondrian, Rubens, Bellini, Garache, and Giacometti, etc., etc.-his poetry is finely diffused, its sentiments and thoughts retain an availability, a disponibllite, whose profoundly assenting voice opens, mirror-image of its message, upon the world in its teeming totality, imperfect and bleeding, confused and somehow stunningly simple. Iconoclasm and distinction thus give way to love and sensed unity-in all places, in all forms. His work at heart, and increasingly, thus reaches out vigorously and insistently towards a consciousness, half buried here, swarming with life there, wherein what he deems the tensely vying forces of image and presence may fuse their energies and their visions. 282 DALHOUSIE REVIEW It was in the 1950s that Bonnefoy's essential resistance to the prevail ing ideologies first emerged with clarity in two sensitively combative essays: "Les Tombeaux de Ravenne" and "L'Acte et le lieu de la poesie." If L'Jmprobable (1959) and Un revefait a Mantoue (1967), L'Arriere-pays (1972) and Le Nu age rouge ( 1977), Entretiens sur la poesie (1981) and La Presence et /'image (1983) and, most recently, Recirs en reve (1987) and La Verite de parole (1988), have gone a long way in refining, exemplifying and deepening the sense of these early essays, the latter have lost nothing of their original pertinence and centrality. Briefly, the fundamental tenets of Bonnefoy's initially limned poetics centre firstly upon a refusal of the shimmering glories of the conceptual and ideal, in order, secondly, to reorient attention and, indeed, our very being-towards the ephemerality, the imperfec tion, but also the hope and infinite profundity, of what he calls presence-and those actes de presence that are poems, paintings, sculptures and so on. Such a position defines itself in contradistinction to an aesthetics of closure, textual or pictural privilege and transcend ence. It shuns the disincarnations of the creative heterocosm, the false immortality of aesthetic pseudo-absolutes, the purity, perfection and hygiene of that creative angelisme, so admirably and futilely pursued and exemplified by the French symbolists from Baudelaire to Mal larme and Valery, yet lurking in the shadows for all writers, all creative artists-and for those that worship them. Such a poetics-that of Mallarme, for example-undergoes, at least in part, a serious perver sion of the ontological relationships of language with being. The proud, dissociated mirages of the elaborated textual space offer us the multifarious structures of its absence or (self-/ world-) evacuation. Its mediation- Mallarme admits himself- is one of failure rather than accession. Its original hope founders on the very process of (self-) annihilation it had fostered. Rather than attaining to transparency, knowledge, exchange, it operates a critical, self-abolishing withdrawal into an "act of pure form," now thought autonomous, transcendent, now purely textual, "scriptive" -the iridescent shiftings of pure Sa, as Barthes would have it, emptied of Se, the windows upon the world tightly closed, sense and being rendered pitifully, but oh so beauti fully!, parenthetic. Bonnefoy's gestures of inquiry are always simple, but deeply perti nent. He asks us, as writers and readers, to reflect upon what we want from writing, and why. Can it truly be that we seek self-burial, a distancing of the written from the world, a dainty, sequined aestheti cism or its hard-nosed counterpart, a dry, rattling formalism? All of POETICS OF YVES BONNEFOY 283 this Bonnefoy tends summarily to evoke with the terms image or imaginaire, urging us to recognize, within ourselves, the contrary pulls of presence and a will to be, for being, that, for the poet, can only be satisfied by an act of considerably delicate, but sure, equilibrium. Such a reversal of optic demands an acceptance of the staggering incontro vertibility of presence and its streaming, bloodied lessons: death, passage, imperfection; and yet it immediately fires the need for love and compassion, for hope, for the "penetration" of knowledge and being available only via the stunning illuminations of the ephemeral, shot through as Bonnefoy sees it with infinity-"the brief pool" of presence, that is, and of those actes de presence that open onto pres ence: our most deeply compelling creative mediations: "words like the sky, I Infinite I Yet here, wholly, suddenly, in the brief pool." 1 La Presence et /'image, which is the text of Bonnefoy's inaugural lecture at the College de France, builds upon much of this and endeav ors to orient us towards a vision, not of compromise, but of reconcilia tion, newly perceived fusion. For this to be achieved, the writer-and reader-certainly must avoid the dizzying lure of the dream's abyss, remain suspicious of the blinding power of language (and its swirling ideologies), resist the prestige of the created, the snare of its hubris. Writing, for Bonnefoy, may be, crucially, self-inscription, but, far from permitting (any more than self-effacement) the indulgences of what Michel Deguy calls the "self-story,"2 it constitutes, rather, a profound effort of consubstantiation, of being with self, with the world, others, and the "Other." "Whatever driftings beset the sign, whatever the blatancy of nothingness, saying I remains for poets reality as such and a precise task, one that recentres words, once one has crossed the boundaries of dream, upon that relationship with others which is the origin of being. " 3 The latter, Bonnefoy argues, assumes its reality, its factualness, from the urgency of the feeling clinging to the creative act, and from our will for being, our desire for meaning. Our task-the poet's, the reader's-thus demands a contin uous, streaming re-establishment of openness, of osmosis, and a con stant reflection upon those forces of(self-) closure that always press in around us. From such openness and reflection, only, come knowledge; and writing/ reading can only be viewed sanely as an acte de connaissance-Claudel would have said co-naissance, a term which, stripped of its claudelian tendentiousness, Bonnefoy would surely be able to welcome.

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